Horace | Critical Essay by Phebe Lowell Bowditch

SOURCE: Bowditch, Phebe Lowell. “Gladiatorial Imagery: The Rhetoric of Expenditure.” In Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage, pp. 1-29. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Bowditch draws on principles of cultural anthropology to propose that Horace functioned in a “gift economy,” and that to some extent his poetry allowed him to resist the patronage that supported him

“The gladiator: crude, loathsome, doomed, lost (importunus, obscaenus, damnatus, perditus) was, throughout the Roman tradition, a man utterly debased by fortune, a slave, a man altogether without worth and dignity (dignitas), almost without humanity” (Barton 1993, 12). No wonder that so many scholars of Horace, confronted with his image as a retired gladiator at the beginning of Epistles 1.1, either make little comment or smile wryly at the irony of the speaker's rhetoric and...